There are few incense ingredients as confusing as Dragons Blood. The name Dragons Blood can refer to no less than sixteen different resins from the same number of trees. It can also refer to the extremely poisonous mineral cinnibar (mercury sulfide) although not in recent times to my knowledge. It is also another name for red rock opium, but it contains no opiates and its intoxicating properties are dubious at best.

Although all amber will emit a pleasant fragrance when heated, don’t dash off and incinerate your jewelry or heaven forbid, your wife or girlfriends jewelry. Besides, quite a lot of amber jewelry contains prehistoric insects as a selling point and I am pretty certain that burning insects, prehistoric or not, is not a pleasant scent.

Anyway, jasmine is a wonderful fragrance. Exotic, rich, sensual and very memorable. I have been impressed with Nippon-Kodo’s Morning Star line before and I was looking forward to seeing if they could deliver on this scent as well. The unlit stick is impressive and except for a slightly too sharp note I could close my eyes and easily imagine I was holding jasmine from my garden in my hand and not an incense stick.

Nippon-Kodo features a musk scent in their Morning Star line and right out of the box it is an intriguing scent. It is spicy, sensual, warm and yet with a brighter herbal note as well. I am personally not looking forward to lighting this stick and attempting to give any sort of accurate description of it because musk can be complex and cause a wide variety of reactions amongst people.

From cheap air fresheners for your car to very expensive perfumes and synthetic versions in a myriad of foods, vanilla is an incredibly popular and versatile scent. It can bring to mind food, romance, comfort, childhood and more. The problem is that lots of people are assaulted with synthetic vanilla fragrances on a day to day basis and so begin to associate a ramped up, overtly strong scent with vanilla.

I have a terrible confession to make. I took a stick of Morning Star Amber out of the package and gave it a cursory sniff and the very first thing that popped into my mind was my grandmothers closet. I can’t explain random mental associations, but I can attempt to explain my overall impressions of this stick. Don’t worry, my grandmothers closet smelled positively wonderful.

When I think of dragons, I am likely to think of brimstone, burning wood, charred peasants and the smell of the pet snake I had several years ago. I am not likely to think of sweet, sultry, sensual scents. Unless of course we are talking about the Fuolornis Fire Dragon as made famous by Douglas Adams and The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. But I digress.